College of Business

College of Business

The U.S. may have its first black president and the Fortune 500 its first black female chief executive, but African American CEOs account for a mere one percent of the chiefs of those 500 largest companies.

Andrew Carton, assistant professor of management and organization at Penn State Smeal College of Business, and Ashleigh Shelby Rosette of Duke University, suggest in the current issue of the Academy of Management Journal that what steers people's perceptions of African Americans are stereotypes about blacks' leadership failings, biases that may not even be conscious.

Making sense of the complex issues the G-20 will tackle at their summit in Pittsburgh this month will be made a little easier thanks to a series of YouTube videos featuring Penn State educators. The list of challenges the G-20 faces is daunting: the global economic crisis, sustainable development, terrorist financing and climate change, among others. Fariborz Ghadar, director of Penn State's Center for Global Business Studies, affirms the importance of the G-20 in today's climate of economic turmoil and change. Terrence Guay, clinical associate professor at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, describes Europe's growing global economic influence.

A survey of 126 companies and 19 academic institutions conducted by AMR Research has identified Penn State's Smeal College of Business as having the best supply chain program in the United States in terms of industry value, program depth, and program scope. Smeal offers supply chain programs at the undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and executive education levels, and all of these programs were considered in the AMR Research report.

The Academy of Management has named Donald Hambrick, Smeal chaired professor of management at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, as the 2009 recipient of the Distinguished Educator Award, the organization's highest honor for management education. Last year, Hambrick received the Scholarly Contributions to Management Award, making him only the third person in the history of the Academy to receive its highest career achievement honors in both teaching and research.

A group of 22 high school students from across the United States is visiting Penn State's Smeal College of Business for a two-week program that gives students from underrepresented groups the opportunity to explore opportunities in business education. The students live in Penn State dorms, have their meals in University dining halls, and take classes on business, careers, and the college experience.

"The Economy and the Graduate," a one-hour show covering executives' perspectives on the short-term economy as well as strategies and advice for recent college graduates and students to secure employment during the national economic downturn, is scheduled to air at 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 5, 5 p.m., Thursday (May 7) and 8 a.m. Friday (May 8) on the Big Ten Network. The show was hosted by Penn State's Smeal College of Business; a preview is available online at http://live.psu.edu/youtube/FfU_O2_Vwfw.

The Food Marketing Institute, the nation's leading trade organization representing food retailers and wholesalers, solicited Penn State Net Impact, a group of MBA students from Penn State's Smeal College of Business, to develop a toolkit to help its 1,500 member companies calculate their carbon footprints. The toolkit, "Carbon Footprint 101," will provide food retailers and wholesalers all they need to know to understand the basics of carbon and greenhouse gas issues as well as how emerging public policy may impact their regulation.

The U.S. economy would be better served by letting failing firms file for bankruptcy rather than by bailing them out under presumptive federal policies that deem them to be "too big to fail," according to new research from Penn State's Smeal College of Business. Washington regulators have justified several recent interventions in the financial realm by warning that firms like Bear Stearns and AIG are too big to fail. Allowing these firms to go bankrupt, the argument goes, would result in fire sales and a domino effect, which pose systematic risks to the entire economy. But Jean Helwege, associate professor of finance in Smea Collegel, writes that there is little to no evidence to support these too-big-to-fail threats of counterparty risk and fire sales.

The Center for Sports Business & Research (CSB&R) at Penn State's Smeal College of Business has reached an agreement with TNS, the world's largest custom research business, for direct access to data from the ESPN Sports Poll, considered the industry standard for monitoring the overall status and health of the sports industry from the fans' perspective.

For the third year in a row, manufacturer W. L. Gore & Associates has awarded a $10,000 grant to Penn State's Master of Manufacturing Management (MMM) Program, which is administered jointly by the College of Engineering and the Smeal College of Business. The gift will aid in the recruitment of exceptional MMM students through two scholarships in support of students enrolled in the program as W. L. Gore & Associates Fellows. The rest of the gift will be used to support the overall operation of the MMM program.

Penn State's Smeal College of Business will "celebrate a decade of diversity awareness," at the 10th Annual Striving Towards Awareness and Respect for Tomorrow (START) Conference at noon on March 31 in the Nittany Lion Inn on the University Park campus. START focuses on diversity initiatives in the workforce providing participants insight into corporate culture, leadership skills to manage a diverse workforce and an opportunity to network with corporate representatives.

Penn State's Master of Manufacturing Management (MMM) degree program recently received grants totaling $35,000 from the Xerox Foundation and Dresser-Rand. This is the fifth year in a row in which Xerox has granted $25,000 to the MMM program. Dresser-Rand, which also has a seat on the program's advisory board, contributed $10,000.

Penn State World Campus recently named Robert Crum, associate professor of accounting at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, as the winner of its 2008 Outstanding MBA Faculty award in recognition of his contributions on the faculty of the World Campus iMBA program.

Hans Baumgartner, chair of the Department of Marketing at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, has been elected president of the Society for Consumer Psychology (SCP), a national organization of academics, practitioners and students dedicated to the study of the psychology of consumer behavior.